The Courses were placed in the framework of the Galileo Galilei Celebrations, the Centenary of the Discovery of Radioactivity, Henri Becquerel, Pierre et Marie Curie, the 50th. Anniversary of the Founding of NATO.
On the occasion of the publication of this volume, we would like to celebrate the Thirty Years of Activity of NATO in Erice.
The first NATO Advanced Study Institute in Erice took place from 27 August to 7 September 1964, directed by Professor A. Zichichi, Founder of the International School of Physics "Ettore Majorana".
The subject of the Course was "Symmetries in Elementary Particle Physics" and the Lecturers were: S. M. Berman, N. Cabibbo, P.K. Kabir, R.P. Feynman, A. Zichichi and G. Zweig.
Topics included: Theoretical Foundations (Lorentz invariance, Parity, Charge conjugation, Time reversal, PCT), Phenomenology of Resonances, Unitary-Symmetries Point of View: SU2 and SU3, Consequences of SU3 Symmetry in Weak Interactions, Are Nucleons Really Indivisible?, Is Astrophysics going to teach us something new about Elementary Particles?, Present Status of Strong, Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions.
The NATO Advanced Study Institute "Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics", in the framework of the International School of Astrophysics "D. Chalonge", took place in Erice from 4 to 16 September 1994.
We would like to dedicate this volume to the Scientific Affairs Division and the ASI Programme of NATO for its continuous and efficient support of the Courses held at the Ettore Majorana Centre in Erice.
N. Sánchez
Director of the Course
The 5th Course on "Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics" is dedicated to Subramanyan Chandrasekhar.
We also pay tribute in this Course to the memory of Viktor Ambartzumian.
Is for me a pleasure to welcome you to Erice to the International School of Astrophysics "Daniel Chalonge", for this 5th Course on "Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics", which is placed in the framework of the Galileo Galilei Celebrations taking place in Europe.
I want to thank all of you for coming to Erice and to the Chalonge School, and I wish you a fruitful, enjoyable staying in Erice during this Course.
I want to dedicate this 5th Course to Professor Subramanyan Chandrasekhar. Professor S. Chandrasekhar was invited to participate to this 5th Course; he was a great and close personal friend of Daniel Chalonge. They both worked on and were deeply interested in the problem of the abundance of the Hydrogen. Is a well established fact of current astronomy today, that the hydrogen is the most abundant element in the cosmos. However, and as can be seen in the work reproduced below, this was a matter of great controversy and intense debate, during the thirties and the forties. At that time, S. Chandrasekhar was based at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis. Later on, he moved to the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research at Chicago, founded and created by John A. Simpson. It was a great pleasure for me, to hear from Professor J. Simpson, at the Erice Chalonge Museum this year in june, his own remembrances of the creation of the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space ! Research o f Chicago, and the com
S. Chandrasekhar came here to Erice during the whole week 1-8 of September 1991, accompanyied by his wife Lalitha. He inaugurated the 1st Course of the International School of Astrophysics dedicated to Daniel Chalonge, delivering the Opening Lecture of this School, the 2 September 1991. He delivered two Lectures: the first one "Daniel Chalonge and the Problem of the Abundance of Hydrogen", and the second one "The Harmonious Blending of the Physical Content and the Mathematical Structure of the General Theory of Relativity".
Not only S. Chandrasekhar was an excellent Lecturer at this School; he was an active and dedicated participant too. All along the week, he followed most of the lectures, and took part in the discussions, with clarifying, deep questions, comments and remarks.
The documents and pictures reproduced here in the following pages, show S. Chandrasekhar, and his wife Lalitha, during the 1st Erice Chalonge Course, where he was pleased to find, among other participants, friends as Bruno Pontecorvo and Peter Bergmann.
The 1st Erice Chalonge Course was registered entirely in video tape by the "CNRS Images Medias"; thus, we have the sound film of the Chandrasekhar Lectures. We had seen in this 5th Course an extract of the video tape showing Chandrasekhar lecturing on Daniel Chalonge at the P.A.M. Dirac Lecture Hall.
Chandrasekhar enjoyed Erice, its historic streets, quarters and meals, particularly, the "Bistecca di Melanzana"; he left his written testimony of that to the restaurant's owner that prepares such special dish.
The work of S. Chandrasekhar is a classic among the classics, and is included in many books and textbooks. Perhaps, the best tribute to pay to him is to read his own work, from his own original papers and books, (for instance, the series of volumes "Selected Papers" published by the University of Chicago, and in which, the 7th volume will be published soon).
The memory I have from Chandrasekhar, from his work and from the meetings with him on different occasions, is that of an original, deep, rigorous, sophisticated and highly cultured scientist and gentleperson. Not only he performed work with such qualities; he communicated exactly, without deformation of any type, what he worked out. Truth was a guiding principle of his life. He was a scientist and a gentleperson who successfully managed to be and to remain himself.
N. Sánchez
Director of the Course
The Armenian Astrophysicist Viktor Ambartzumian died the 12 August 1996, some weeks before the beginning of this Course, at the age of 88. He was born in Armenia the 18 september 1908.
Viktor Ambartzumian was a pioneering of the Stellar Theoretical Astrophysics, working on the theory of Stellar Evolution and Interestellar Media.
He also pioneered research in Relativistic Astrophysics, namely on superdense stellar configurations.
He was the founder (in 1946) and the Director of the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, at the north of Erevan, Armenia.
He was the President (from 1946 to 1993) of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.
He was the creator and Chief Editor of the Journal "Astrofizika".
Viktor Ambartzumian was a great and close friend of Daniel Chalonge.
Daniel Chalonge visited on several occasions his armenian astrophysicist friends, and particularly Viktor Ambartzumian, and hosted several times Ambartzumian in Paris.
The pictures and documents reproduced in the Erice Chalonge Museum show Daniel Chalonge and Viktor Ambartzumian, and their families, together in differents occasions:
At Byurakan in 1946 for the inauguration of the Observatory.
In Paris, at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris for the Colloquia organized by Daniel Chalonge, in particular the Colloquium in June 1953 on "Fundamental Problems of Stellar Classification".
In Byurakan again, in 1971, at Ambartzumian's Home.
Ambartzumian and Chalonge families were also closely linked by a deep friendship.
I met personnally Viktor Ambartzumian and his wife, in Buenos Aires, in 1974, when I was young student and he came to I.A.F.E and the University of Buenos Aires (Ciencias Exactas, Departamento de Fisica) to deliver a special course on Stellar Evolution.
N. Sánchez
Director of the Course
Is for me a pleasure to welcome you to Erice to the International School of Astrophysics "Daniel Chalonge", for this 6th Course on "Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics", which is placed in the framework of the Galileo Galilei Celebrations taking place in Europe.
This Course is also placed in the framework of the International Celebrations of the "Centenary of the Discovery of Radioactivity (1896-1898 / 1996-1998). Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie".
I want to thank all of you for coming to Erice and to the Chalonge School, and I wish you a fruitful, enjoyable staying in Erice during this Course.
I want to dedicate this 6th Course to Professor Abdus SALAM.
Professor Abdus Salam was born in Jhang, Pakistan, the 29 January 1926, performed his education at Panjab University, Lahore, and at St. John's College, Cambridge, and obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics at Cavendish Laboratory (1952).
In 1957 he becomes Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London.
He was the Founder (1964) and Director (1964-1996) of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste.
Professor Abdus SALAM received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work on the gauge unification of electromagnetic and weak interactions, the unified force being named "electroweak" by him, and the prediction of the existence of weak neutral currents and W, Z bosons before their experimental discovery. Nobel Prize shared with S.Glashow and S. Weinberg.
He worked on the parity violation on weak interactions, the unitary symmetry and the role of gravity in particle physics, supersymmetry theory and its superspace formulation, supergravity and Kaluza Klein theories in the search of a quantum theory of gravity, as well as grand unified theories (electroweak and strong nuclear unification) and their associated proton-decay prediction. He promoted the new field of astroparticle physics.
Besides his outstanding scientific work, Professor Abdus SALAM was a Servant of Peace, he devoted his life to the formidable and praiseworthy task of developing and promoting, actively and efficientely, Science and Technology in the Third World.
In november 1983 he founded the Third World Academy of Sciences.
The Third World found in him its powerful and illustrious advocate of science, technology, development and international cooperation.
Professor Abdus SALAM was held in high esteem world-wide. He was an open, creative, brilliant, indefatigable personality, who accomplished with outstanding intelligence, energy and generosity, extraordinary work and life.
N. Sánchez
Director of the Course
"Scientific knowledge is a shared heritage of all Mankind; East and West, South and North have all equally participated in its creation in the past, and, we hope, they will in the future. This joint endeavour in sciences is one of the unifying forces among the diverse people on this globe"
Abdus Salam
"It must be considered a birthright of scientific communities in a developing nation that the country should have at least one complete central library containing most of the scientific and technological journals, and all scientific books. There must be free access to this scientific literature."
Abdus Salam
I met Ya. B. Zeldovich and his wife on several occasions, first in july 1980 in Jena at the "International Conference on GRG" (Einstein Centennial Year) under the presidence of Peter G. Bergmann, and then after in the series of Quantum Gravity Seminars organized in Moscow by M.A. Markov.
During his life Professor Zeldovich made fundamental contributions to chemical, nuclear and elementary particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology.
A vivacious and humorous gentleman, he also enjoyed writing cosmic essays, plays and poems.
He began his career at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Physics,
But it was his work at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in the 1960s that subsequently won him worldwide recognition.
- Birth and expansion of the Universe, matter and antimatter. Cosmic strings
- Large scale structure, cosmic microwave background fluctuations and galactic distribution.
- Dynamo mechanisms in astrophysical objects: stars, galaxies and accretion disks, methods of measuring cosmic magnetic fields
Previous Courses of the Chalonge School were dedicated to the Thirty Years of Activity of NATO in Erice, and to Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Abdus Salam, Efim S. Fradkin Yakob Borisovich Zeldovich, and to the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of NATO.
The 8th Course devoted to Phase Transitions in the Early Universe: Theory and Observations was dedicated to Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who did so much for this field and beyond. The work of Andrei Sakharov is at the heart of the Courses of the Chalonge School. His exceptional life and personality left a legacy on Science, Intellectual Freedom and Human Dignity.
He was a prominent nuclear physicist, as it is well known, but also worked on fundamental problems of cosmology and gravity. His work connecting macroscopic cosmology and gravity with microphysics was pioneering and innovative. He worked at the P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics at Moscow and under arrest in forced exil at Gorki (now Nizhniy Novgorod).
In 1975, he received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Among his contributions, let us recall briefly :
(i) baryogenesis (1967), he proposed proton decay and combined it with CP asymmetry and deviation from thermal equilibrium in order to explain the cosmological asymmetry of matter and anti-matter;
(ii) oscillations of the Cosmic Microwave Background space spectrum (1965), he was by far the first to notice and describe the existence of acoustic oscillations in the space spectra of the CMB ( Sakharov oscillations), their incorporation in cosmological models arised a variety of developments, their detection started since COBE, it is in current progress and will continue through the present day and next CMB experiments;
(iii) induced gravity , gravitation as derived from quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, in connection with the ideas of John A. Wheeler, and the problem of quantum unification of gravitation and particle interactions, later implemented by several groups in the context of the cosmological constant as well as the entropy of black holes.
I thank Efim S. Fradkin, Serguei P. Novikov, Yuri Parijskij, Igor D. Novikov, Leonid P. Grishchuk, Aleksandr D. Dolgov, Aleksandr A. Zhelthukin, for their valuable recollections and testimonies. Yuri Parijskij specially composed some time ago the page reproduced here below with his permission.
See for example:
A.D. Sakharov, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 49, 345 (1965). [Soviet Phys. JETP 22, 241 (1966)]
A.D. Sakharov, Pi'sma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 5, 32 (1967).
I.D. Novikov, Dark Matter and Sakharov Oscillations in the 3rd Course of the Chalonge School, Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics: the Early Universe , NATO ASI Series 467 C, pp 391-402, Eds N. Sanchez, and A. Zichichi, Kluwer Pub (1995).
Y. Parijskij, Dark Ages of the Universe in the 6th Course of the Chalonge School, Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics: Primordial Cosmology , NATO ASI Series 467 C, pp 443-466, Eds. N. Sanchez and A. Zichichi, Kluwer Pub (1998).
A. D. Dolgov, Phase Transitions during Inflation and the Chemically Inhomogeneous Universe , in this volume.
N. G. Sanchez Archives, Paris, and Erice P.A.M. Dirac and D. Chalonge Museums.
Norma G. Sanchez
International School of Astrophysics 'D.Chalonge' http://www.obspm.fr/chalonge Updated 7/01 Back to Chalonge School Page